On-Page SEO in 2016

On-page optimisation is the foundations of your SEO efforts and without it you are guaranteed to fail. Just like every other SEO aspect, on-page SEO standards change every few years which means what would have worked in 2014 might not have the same impact today.

Here are three tips to help you get your on-page optimisation up-to-scratch in 2016:

1) Your content must shine

Your content is easily the biggest factor when it comes to on-page optimisation. The content on your website used to revolve around whether or not you had enough keywords on the page or the right H tags. However, today it’s more about whether the content is considered useful, valuable and relevant by your audience.

Only high quality content matters, if your audience loves your content then Google will love your content too.

Visual content is very popular these days too, so if you use high quality images alongside content, infographics and/or videos then your content is likely to be more popular.

2) Grab your audience’s attention with titles and descriptions

Grab your audience’s attention with interesting, unique and creative page titles and descriptions. When someone is searching for an estate agent via Google, you only have the title and description to entice the users so it is important you tempt them to click on your website.  

Page titles should be around 70 characters, contain the primary keyword (preferably at the start of the title) and be unique and creative enough to entice the user.

As for the description, it needs to also be unique, informative and creative. The description should be relevant to the page, summarising the pages content within 155 characters.

3) User-friendly domains

The impact of an exact match domain isn’t what it used to, however your domain name still plays a huge role in your rankings, such as the age of the domain and number of links pointing at it.

Here are few tips for user-friendly domains:

• They should be kept short and sweet.
• They should have meaning and relate to the page.
• Avoid dynamic URLs - e.g. www.example.com/User-Friendly-URLS instead of www.example.com/etyo35ka5
• Include keywords if you can.
• Keep the structure of the URL consistent.

In conclusion, the key to great on-page optimisation in 2016 is to create amazing content for your audience, not Google.